It Would Be A Really Good Idea If…

This story comes from the winter of 2012. I was fifteen years old and I was staying with a group of other students in a hotel on the shores of Lake Bosomtwe just outside of Kumasi. Lake Bostomtwe was beautiful and warm, it was almost perfectly round, having been created by a meteorite.strike several million years ago. One of the girls on the trip had brought a box full of chalk with her. It was supposed to be used to dye the ends of your hair, hers was purple if memory serves. Then an idea occurred to me. It was one of those horrible ideas which jumps out at you wearing a fancy suit and a funny hat, saying “Hey! Boy you are gonna love this!” It was an idea that looks really good when you are drunk, and being drunk and.being fifteen years old are not mutually exclusive. The idea was to dye my hair with chalk in the colour if the Ghanaian flag, yellow, red and green. This took quite a long time because my hair was dark brown and only a few centimetres long. By the time I was finished it was pitch dark and everyone was sitting in their rooms gossiping about the people in the other rooms. I decided to wait until morning and show everyone morning to show off my new do. After several hours of playing the rousing card game bullshit with my roommates and, yes, gossiping about people in the other rooms, I went to sleep. This is something I do every night and I consider myself pretty good at it. Eight hours give or take and then I wake up. This time however, I woke up after three or so hours because my face was on fire. I struggled with sleep until morning and by the time I eventually gave up and went to breakfast I was exhausted and thoroughly annoyed. The first thing I heard as I sat down with my toast was, “oh my god! Why is your face red?! And why is your hair green?!” As it turns out, not only could people not see the Ghanaian flag in my hair, but also I was allergic to the chalk which I had rubbed into my scalp and left overnight. I paid for this teenage blunder by walking around for the next 18 hours feeling as though ants had crawled into my skull and set themselves on fire. The moral of this story? Simple: don’t be stupid.